Thanks, guys.
And now for something completely different. I have to admit that my painting has slowed down quite a lot lately, and part of the reason is that I'm a bit burned out when it comes to painting Eldar. So in order to give myself a break and refresh my pallette (as it were), a few weeks ago I decided to paint up something completely different, and dug out my old Empire fleet for Man O' War.
The models were mostly in pretty good condition. Some of the flagpoles were broken or missing, but it was easy enough to 3D print some replacements. A couple of the yards on the Hellhammers were broken, but were easy enough to fix. I had cut out the printed paper sails from the painting guide in the original game box and glued them to the yards of the Wargalleys. Fortunately I was able to find six unused yards of the correct length in my bits box, so I was able to remove and replace those easily. I had undercoated a couple of the models but never got around to trying to actually paint them. Otherwise everything was intact.
A few weeks later and here they are:
(Click for larger image.)If I include a wizard, this adds up to just over the standard 1,000 points for the game, so I can swap a few things around and take different options if I wish.
The sails and pennants are all paper. I do have files to 3D print some sculpted sails, but in keeping with the age of the models I decided to keep things old-school and make paper ones instead. However, I suspected that printing out the old sail sheets and using them as-is probably wouldn't look that good, so instead I cut out sails from blank heavy paper and then painted them freehand.
The pennants have symbols printed on them. In particular, the wargalleys have all of the original symbols from the original sheets on them, so they still correspond to the appropriate card templates from the box. However, I then used paint to colour the flags so that they wouldn't look too printed.
This is the first time that I've painted something in the 'box art' colour scheme. I usually prefer to come up with my own liveries and colour schemes, but for these I decided to go with old-school red & black. These models date back to the height of GW's 'red period' and it seemed to fit.
Here are the individual ships/squadrons, starting with the Admiral's flagship, the mighty Greatship:
(Click for larger image.)Two squadrons of Wargalleys (the plastic ships that came in the box):
(Click for larger image.)One squadron of Wolfships (these are the best ships in the Empire fleet):
(Click for larger image.)One squadron of Hellhammers (dangerous but unpredictable experimental ships with giant cannon, which launch the ships backwards when they fire):
(Click for larger image.)And three Griffon riders. Rules for fliers were added in the
Sea of Blood supplement for the game. Man O' War was hopelessly inconsistent about scale. Most of the ships were somewhere between 1:900 and 1:1200 scale, although a few were smaller (the Black Ark of Naggaroth for the Dark Elf fleet was about 1:2000). The fliers, though were much bigger, closer to 1:300 scale.
(Click for larger image.)That's all of the Empire models I had. There was another Empire ship in the range, the 'Ironfist' mortar barge. There were two different versions of the Ironfist released, one of which was very small and had no oars, despite it having them in the rules. A later version was released that did have oars, based on the Hellhammer hull but with a mortar instead of a giant cannon. However, I never owned either model. I would like to add a squadron of them to this fleet if only for the sake of completeness, but not if I have to 3D print them. This fleet is currently composed entirely of original 90s models and I'd like to keep it that way. I have 3D printed a few replacement parts but not whole ships.
I have added bases to the ships, which are 3D printed in clear blue resin. This is a concession to practicality for some of the other fleets that I plan to print and paint in the near future. From what I gather, the Bretonnian ships I've been looking at need bases to be stable. These don't have that problem, but I want to keep things consistent from one fleet to another, so I've based these as well.
With that in mind, next up will probably be an Elf fleet, followed by Bretonnians. After that I might get back to those Space Elves.
